Thursday, August 11, 2011

Investing to save

Something had been bothering me about the recent calls for more funding for personalised genomic medicine, on the grounds that investment now will save us billions in the future. Then came the flash of light.

The economic growth models that I was introduced to as an undergraduate went: save, in order to invest, in order to produce future income.

Now we hear increasingly: invest to produce future savings.

I think it may have started with Early Years. We will save ourselves an awful lot of money on police, justice, prisons, health care & benefits if only we spend money now on children from deprived or dysfunctional backgrounds to rescue & divert them from the future which will otherwise be theirs (& ours).

Then it entered medicine big time: GPs get paid for the amount of preventative work they do – to save money which we would otherwise have to find to treat us when we go & get old & ill despite all that.

Meanwhile of course we have to go on spending at just the same rate as we did before on all those problems which our forebears lacked the foresight to prevent.

So we just have to borrow somebody else’s savings to finance our investment. Pay them back when we can reduce our expenditure.



Upfront investment would actually save the NHS money down the line - Sir John Bell, chairman of the Government Genomics Strategy Group
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